Soon a group of NKVD operatives stopped them to check their papers. One of the officers noticed that the high military awards on Tavrin’s chest were attached incorrectly. The awards included the Gold Star of a Hero and the Aleksandr Nevsky Order that have already been mentioned, citing Cookridge’s story. Tavrin even had a fake newspaper clipping saying that he received the Gold Star on October 9, 1943. In fact, the star apparently belonged to Major General Ivan Shepetov, who was captured by the Germans on May 26, 1942 and executed in the Flossenberg Camp on May 21, 1943 after he tried to escape from the camp.
Interestingly, Tavrin did not try to fight or escape. A head of the local NKVD unit quickly established that there had never been a Major Tavrin in the 39th Army. The NKVD officers also found Tavrin’s sophisticated diversion equipment hidden in the motorcycle. Tavrin and Shilova were sent to the GUKR in Moscow. Three NKVD and one huge SMERSH search groups also arrested the pilot, navigator, radio operator, and two gunners of the German plane. All of them were sent to Moscow.
The Tavrins agreed to participate in a SMERSH radio game called first ‘A Couple’, then ‘Fog’. Most probably, SMERSH officers promised the couple that their lives would be spared if they collaborated. SMERSH’s task was to persuade the Zeppelin agents to come to Soviet territory, where they would be caught. Baryshnikov supervised the writing of false radio messages by Majors Frolov and Grigorenko (the future KGB colonel general), and then Abakumov or his deputy Isai Babich approved the texts. Pavel Fedotov, head of the 2nd NKGB Directorate, and Leontiev, head of the NKVD Department for Combating Bandits, were informed about each message because they supervised the investigation of the Tavrin case. Tavrin and his wife were kept in Lubyanka Prison as prisoners 35 and 22 (corresponding, apparently, to the numbers of their cells), and were taken to a secret dacha outside Moscow for radio transmission sessions.
Tarasov mentions that ‘the contact with the enemy was made with a delay because Pokrovsky [Tavrin] was not honest during the investigation and it took a long time for the Soviet counterintelligence to find out all the necessary details. To explain the long delay in communication, it was decided to create the impression that Pokrovskaya [Shilova] had tried to establish contact but was unable to do so due to her poor training’.55 Finally, in September 1944, Shilova sent her first message to Zeppelin under SMERSH’s controclass="underline" ‘We have arrived successfully, and started the work.’56
The Germans were completely fooled. Later ‘John’ testified to SMERSH that ‘the radio contacts [with Shilova] were conducted with difficulty because Pokrovsky’s wife was poorly trained’.57 According to the messages, Tavrin was trying to penetrate the Kremlin circle. Strangely, some messages were addressed to Gräfe, although Tavrin was aware of Gräfe’s death on January 1, 1944. On April 9, 1945, Shilova sent the last message, to which Berlin did not respond.
Soon after the war, in August 1945, the OSO sentenced members of the plane crew to death and they were executed. For some time SMERSH and, later, the MGB, hoped that German agents might visit the Tavrins, and the couple was kept alive. On February 1, 1952, the Military Collegium sentenced them to death. Tavrin admitted that he was guilty of treason, but rejected the accusation of being a terrorist: ‘I have never been determined to follow the German order to conduct a terrorist act in the center [Moscow].’58 His wife stated the same: ‘I was dreaming about the Motherland and my people. I do not regret that I flew back. If it is necessary, I’ll die… I ask for one thing: I’d like to share my fate with my husband… I believe that from the moment he stepped on our native ground he would not do anything against the Motherland.’59 Tavrin was executed on March 28, 1952, and his wife, four days later. In May 2002 the Chief Military Prosecutor’s Office refused to rehabilitate them.
It remains unclear why Cookridge gave an erroneous account of the Tavrin story. It’s possible that the documents he used were a red herring to conceal the fact that for two years Tavrin was being trained for a special assignment and was not successfully serving in the Red Army. Unfortunately, in his recent book about Nazi espionage Christer Jörgensen repeated Cookridge’s version of Tavrin’s story without any changes.60
However, not everything is clear in Tavrin’s ‘true’ story, which is now known due to the publications of FSB historians who had access to three volumes of the Tavrin investigation file. For instance, Aleksandr Mikhailov, FSB Major General, describes how in the 1930s, Tavrin successfully escaped from arrest three times, managed to attend law school, and even worked as a senior investigator at a Prosecutor’s Office in Voronezh.61 It would have been almost impossible to do this in the 1930s, when people’s backgrounds were constantly checked. The first escape, when some arrested criminals supposedly dismantled a wall and fled together with Shilo, is especially suspicious. This is one of the typical methods that the NKVD used for legalizing their secret informers.62
During interrogations in Moscow, Zhilenkov stated that in the German camp Tavrin told him that before the war he ‘lived in Voronezh and worked in the local NKVD directorate as head of the personal guards of the first secretary of the Voronezh Province Party Committee’, Iosif Vareikis.63 Zhilenkov added that he did not believe Tavrin’s stories, especially because ‘soon after Tavrin arrived in the camp, he was accused of stealing 130 rubles, and then prisoners beat him up for cheating while playing cards’. Anyway, it is possible that Shilo-Tavrin was recruited as an OGPU-NKVD agent after his first arrest and then luckily managed to ‘escape’. If so, most probably he went to the Germans as an NKVD (i.e., Sudoplatov’s) agent. This explains why he surrendered to the NKVD operatives practically voluntarily. If this scenario is accurate, it is a mystery why he was finally shot.
But perhaps the most complicated and least-known radio game was organized in December 1944 in collaboration with the General Staff’s Intelligence Directorate (RU).64 A month earlier, Soviet agents had reported from Germany that the Nazis were preparing an attack against American and British troops in the Ardennes. To get the Germans to move some of their troops from the Eastern Front to the Ardennes, Stalin ordered that a deception game be devised to persuade the Germans that the Red Army was exhausted and would temporarily discontinue its offensive.
Tarasov and Fyodor Kuznetsov, head of the RU, were responsible for the operation. They devised a very complicated radio game involving twenty-four transmitters located in a number of Soviet cities, from Kuibyshev to Leningrad. They transmitted reports, supposedly from various sources, but all containing the same basic information: part of the Soviet troops had been called back from the fronts for reorganization and training. RU agents disseminated similar disinformation among the population in the war zone.
The operation worked perfectly. The German command completely trusted the false information, and, on December 16, 1944, the Germans began their attack in the Ardennes, which involved not only the last reserves of the German army but also several tank divisions transferred from the Eastern Front. While the Western Allies were fighting in the Ardennes, the Soviet troops were preparing a new assault. On January 12, 1945, at the request of the Allies, the 1st Ukrainian Front and then the 1st Belorussian Front began their attack on Poland, and on January 13 and 14, the 2nd and 3rd Belorussian fronts attacked Eastern Prussia. The German defense in these areas was weakened because of radio game disinformation.
From 1943 to 1945, SMERSH and the NKGB conducted 183 radio games, some of which continued for years.65 Local SMERSH departments also organized radio games. Overall, approximately 400 German intelligence officers and agents were arrested and participated in the games. When the games ended, most of them were shot. For example, in March 1944 SD officer Alois Galfe, who had specialized in training the Russian POWs recruited for Operation Zeppelin, was captured by SMERSH operatives not far from Moscow as part of the ‘Zagadka’ (Puzzle) game.66 This game was jointly conducted by the 3rd and 4th GUKR SMERSH departments and continued after the arrest of Galfe. Galfe was taken to Lubyanka Prison, where Abakumov interrogated him for six hours. On January 27, 1945, the OSO sentenced Galfe to death as a German spy and he was executed.